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There’s a major scandal at the Environmental Protection Agency that’s being ignored by the mainstream media. The EPA is being accused of conducting Nazi-like experiments on human guinea pigs.
A lawsuit alleges that the EPA paid as many as 41 people in North Carolina $12 an hour to sit in a gas chamber and breathe in diesel fumes for two hours. The idea was to measure the health effects of the particulate matter in diesel fumes on subjects. The suit brought by an organization called the National Legal and Policy Center also alleges that the levels of particulate matter was 21 times the level permitted as safe for human exposure by the EPA itself.
Testing on the Poor
The suit also alleges that some of the participants were elderly and infirm individuals who would be more susceptible to the fumes. Some of the subjects reportedly suffered from conditions such as asthma, hypertension, and metabolic syndrome. At least one woman who participated in the study reportedly had to be hospitalized after the “tests.”
The experiments were carried out at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. North Carolina is a poorer state with a high unemployment rate. Since North Carolina has a high African American population, a disproportionate number of the subjects might have been black. The Center is also alleging that EPA Director Lisa Jackson signed off on the experiment and that she was aware of it.
Strangely enough, Jackson herself testified to Congress that fine particulate matter like that which the subjects were exposed to was lethal. In other words, Jackson knew the experiments could potentially kill the subjects.
The experiment is disturbingly reminiscent of a death machine used by both the Nazis and the Soviet NKVD (KGB) in the 1930s and ’40s. The machine was a truck converted into a mobile gas chamber; the chamber worked by having fumes from the engine pumped into the back of the truck. Victims were placed in the truck, which drove around until they were dead. The method wasn’t very effective, and the Nazis soon switched to gas chambers.
The experiment is also reminiscent of the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment conducted by the US Public Health Service in the mid-20th century. In that abomination, doctors for the service refused to treat poor African-American men in the South who were suffering from the deadly venereal disease, syphilis, with antibiotics. Some of the men died unnecessarily, because the subjects could have been cured by the antibiotics.
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Violates the Standards
What’s worse is that these experiments may violate the accepted standards for scientific research—the Nuremburg Code. The lawyers for the Center allege that the EPA violated the code when it conducted the experiments. The code was developed after the trial of Nazi scientists at Nuremburg, Germany, after World War II.
The code consists of ten simple points that are very clear and easy to understand. From the descriptions, it sure sounds as if the EPA violated some points of the code. These include points number four and five:
Point Number Four: “The experiment should be conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.”
Point Number Five: “No experiment should be conducted where there is a prior reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.”
The EPA is being accused of conducting questionable and inhumane experiments on the poor and possibly minorities: experiments that violate accepted standards and possibly US law. Attorney Steven Milloy also alleges the experiments violated the EPA’s own rules on experiments. Yet the media is ignoring the accusations.
The news about the suit appeared last October, yet it wasn’t picked up by a single major news outlet. One has to wonder if some sort of liberal bias in favor of environmental regulation is at play here.
The story is a sensational one, yet it doesn’t seem to register on Big Media’s radar. A federal agency is being given a free pass possibly because reporters agree with the agency’s goals.
Congressional Hearings on EPA Coming Up
Congressmen Paul Gosar, Matt Salmon, David Schweikert, and Trent Franks—all Republicans—are holding hearings on what they call EPA overreach. The first of the hearings was held in Prescott, Arizona, last week.
It isn’t clear if the hearings will cover the testing abuses or not. They seem to be more focused on President Obama’s efforts to use regulations to limit the burning of coal.
These hearings were mostly focused on the EPA’s closure of the coal-burning Navajo Generating Station in Arizona. The EPA has recently implemented stricter federal regulations on coal burning power plants that have caused a number of such plants to close.
Some news stories indicate that as many as 15,000 megawatts of electricity from such plants has been taken offline since Obama began implementing stricter standards on coal plants in 2009. Reuters has reported that plants generating as much as 37,000 megawatts’ worth of power could be shut down by the Obama Administration’s regulations in the next ten years.
The problem is that there is no other source of power to replace the electricity that would be taken offline. The Obama Administration has not approved new nuclear plants, although the Department of Energy has plans to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on such small-scale nuclear power plants.
Obviously, small-scale nuclear power will be a tough sell, particularly to left-wing environmentalists who think nuclear energy is evil. Yet Obama will have to push it if he wants to implement his ambitious plans to cut back on coal use to prevent global warming.
One way that he may try to sell nuclear power is to push the toxic side effects of coal. The experiment in North Carolina may have been designed to demonstrate how toxic fumes from coal-burning power plants are. The Center’s lawsuit seeks to block regulations created with data from the North Carolina testing.
It looks like there are some nasty skeletons in the EPA’s closet. Unfortunately, it looks like the mainstream media wants to keep that closet door shut. I just hope the story about the North Carolina testing isn’t being covered up because journalists don’t want to be seen as critical of global warming or the EPA.
I also have to wonder what other abuses might be going on at the EPA. Are there other questionable experiments that we don’t know about? If there are, it should be as big a scandal as that at the National Security Agency. Perhaps it is time to subpoena Lisa Jackson and have her explain this experiment to Congress and the American people.
If these allegations are true, the EPA may have engaged in human rights violations. That means it might have violated international law as well as US law. That will certainly make the United States look very bad when it appears in the foreign press.
Maybe somebody should send this story to The Guardian newspaper in Manchester, England; it seems to be the only mainstream news outlet not afraid to go after the Obama Administration these days. This is a major scandal, and it should be properly investigated.
